Full Description
The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European — Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume I, surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense linguistic diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.
Contents
1. Part 0: Introduction; 2. The Circum-Baltic Languages: Introduction to the volume (by Dahl, Osten); 3. Part 1: Survey of selected Circum-Baltic languages and language varieties; 4. The Latvian language and its dialects (by Balode, Laimute); 5. The Lithuanian language and its dialects (by Balode, Laimute); 6. Russian varieties in the southeastern Baltic area: Urban Russian of the 19th century (by Cekmonas, Valeriy); 7. Russian varieties in the southeastern Baltic area: Rural dialects (by Cekmonas, Valeriy); 8. Swedish dialects around the Baltic Sea (by Rendahl, Anne-Charlott); 9. The Finnic languages (by Laakso, Johanna); 10. Part 2: Early history of the Circum-Baltic languages; 11. The origin of the Scandinavian languages (by Dahl, Osten); 12. Baltic influence on Finnic languages (by Larsson, Lars-Gunnar); 13. Part 3: Contact phenomena in minor Circum-Baltic languages; 14. The role of language contact in the formation of Karelian, past and present (by Pugh, Stefan M.); 15. Syntactic code-copying in Karaim (by Csato, Eva Agnes); 16. Yiddish in the Baltic region (by Jacobs, Neil G.); 17. The North Russian Romani dialect: Interference and Code Switching (by Rusakov, Alexandr Yu.); 18. On some Circum-Baltic features of the Pskov-Novgorod (Northwestern Central Russian) dialect (by Cekmonas, Valeriy); 19. Appendix; 20. Name index; 21. Language index; 22. Subject index
